Twenty years after the Bosnian massacre at Srebrenica, the bereaved still fight for justice

Atrocity: a skull being studied by an osteologist (Picture: Lucy Young)

More than 8,000 men and boys were slaughtered during the Srebrenica massacre - the worst mass killing on European soil since World War Two.

As the 20th anniversary approaches, remains of the dead continue to be unearthed and hundreds more are yet to be identified.

Kiran Randhawa travelled to Bosnia, a country divided along ethnic lines, to speak to survivors and bereaved families who are still fighting for justice.

IF IT WERE not for the smell, it would be like any other warehouse.

But this cold room in the north eastern Bosnian town of Tuzla is anything but a typical storage facility.

Inside each of the 2,000 bags lie some of the unidentified remains of the missing men of the Srebrenica massacre.

Nera Cosic, an osteologist, is part of a team of scientists with the International Commission on Missing Persons, who have spent the last 15 years using DNA analysis to give names to the 8,372 mostly Muslim victims of the 1995 killings.

Whenever a mass grave is unearthed, the bones are tested and then cross-referenced with more than 90,000 blood samples taken from relatives to find a match.

“You can have a bag filled with bones belonging to 100 different people,” Ms Cosic said. “Some of the bones may even belong to people who are already buried, but because their bodies were scattered at different sites, many have been buried with just partial remains. It is very difficult for the families.”

Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the killing, yet around 1,400 men and boys who were slaughtered in the massacre are still to be found or named.

The deaths in the town of Srebrenica came towards the end of the Bosnian war. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims who were supposed to be under United Nations protection were forced from their homes at gunpoint by the Bosnian Serb army intent on “cleansing” the town and claiming it as their own.

Mejra Dzogaz who lost two of her sons (Picture: Lucy Young)

Women and children were separated from their families, while their menfolk, including boys as young as 10, were executed in their thousands and dumped in mass graves.

Mejra Dzogaz lost her two sons Munib, 21 and Omer, 19, in the slaughter in July 1995. She was already mourning her husband Mustafa, 49 and eldest son Zuhdija, 19, who were killed by the Bosnian Serb military during the conflict three years earlier.

The 66-year-old lives just a stone’s throw from where their bodies are buried at a memorial site to the victims in Potacari, a village outside Srebrenica.

“I’m only living because I can’t be buried alive,” she says quietly. “It’s like wandering in the dark, not living because you want to live but living because you have no choice.”

She takes a deep breath and mutters a prayer under her breath as she recalls the events of 20 years ago.

“My sons were not home when Srebrenica fell,” Mrs Dzogaz says. “I never got to say anything to them for that last time, there was no goodbye.”

Along with most of the residents, she fled to the nearby Dutch-controlled UN base outside Srebenica to seek shelter and protection from Serb forces.

Her sons joined a column of 15,000 men who set out on a perilous 63-mile journey through mountains and minefields to the free territory in Tuzla.

“In 2009 I was informed that they had found the remains of one of my sons and two months later they called me about my other son as well,” said Mrs Dzogaz. “I didn’t wanted to bury the second one immediately because his body, found in two different mass grave sites, was incomplete, but I ended up burying them both in the end.

“Up until that time, I held on to the hope they were alive somewhere, perhaps in a prison, or a concentration camp, somewhere doing hard labour, but at least alive.”

It was only this year that Serbia made the first arrests of seven men accused of direct involvement in the slaughter, while the trial of the man accused of masterminding it, Ratko Mladic, continues in The Hague.

Meanwhile, Britain has drafted a UN resolution which aims to establish July 11 as a memorial day for its victims.

But it has come under fierce criticism from Serbia as well as the Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated region in Bosnia, who warn it could cause “tension, friction and further destabilise” the region.

Hasan Hasanovic, a survivor, said the tragedy is “very much unfinished” because the Serbs refuse to acknowledge the killings were “genocide”.

“It’s their own shame and they still deny what they did,” said Mr Hasanovic. “It is very much unfinished, we live in this divided country, Muslims and Serbs haven’t started to reconcile and yet we have to live together. We need some justice now for the survivors.

Hasan Hasanoviø survived a death march (Picture: Lucy Young)

“Those who did this should be brought to justice. Nobody should even dare to deny this, nobody has the right to deny this was genocide.”

Mr Hasanovic was among the men of Srebrenica who began the walk towards the free territory on 11 July 1995.

During that five-day journey dubbed the Death March, he was shot at, forced to hide in a stream for hours and walked without food, water and sleep.

His twin brother Husein, 19 and father Aziz, 41, were killed along the way. He was one of the few who survived.

He was reunited with his mother, younger brother and grandparents when he arrived at Tuzla airport on 16 July, which had become a makeshift refugee camp.

“When I got there and people heard I had come from Srebrenica, I was rounded upon by hundreds of women and children all looking at me and asking me questions about their loved ones,” Mr Hasanovic, now 39, says. “I kept apologising saying I didn’t know, but I was looking at them and thinking most of them will never see their fathers, brothers, grandfathers, uncles ever again.”

He buried his father in 2003 and his twin brother two years later, when their remains were finally discovered during excavations of mass graves. So far five mass graves have been discovered and at least 70 secondary sites have also been found, where bodies were later moved by Serb forces.

A British charity, Remembering Srebrenica, is marking the anniversary by holding ceremonies across the UK including a service at Westminster Abbey on 6 July, and organising visits to the town. In Srebrenica, thousands, including the Princess Royal, will gather on 11 July, the day the Serbs took the town.

Around 130 husbands, sons and brothers will be buried as part of the commemorations.

Mr Hasanovic added: “We live as survivors not normal human beings any more. We don’t have any joy in our lives. Every day we think about what happened, you can’t escape these thoughts, they will haunt you wherever you go.”